Robison: GOP won't lure blacks with past truths

CLAY ROBISON, Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 12, 2002

AUSTIN -- The Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War produced little for Texans to brag about. It was a time of violence, racism, economic turmoil and governmental repression that most Americans of all races, ethnicities and political stripes would abhor today.

It also fed a legacy of segregation that was to harm minority Texans for the next 100 years.

In a preposterous bit of political manipulation, however, the Texas Republican Party is trying to exploit the darkest period in the state's history to improve its abysmal standing among black voters.

The GOP has a huge job on its hands if it hopes to make any significant change in the voting patterns of black Texans, who normally vote as high as 80 or 90 percent for Democratic candidates.

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It will take much more than the glossy flier that party leaders have prepared, reciting long-ago times in which blacks benefited from Republican leaders or policies, beginning with the role of the GOP, then a new party, in abolishing slavery over the protestations of many Democratic officeholders.

Many of the events lauded in the flier occurred during the Reconstruction years, when Texas was governed, first, by a military governor and then by an authoritarian governor and a constitutionally insensitive Legislature elected in 1869 under widely fraudulent circumstances.

The handout doesn't acknowledge those controversies.

It brags that the first 42 blacks elected to the Texas Legislature were Republicans, without explaining that they served during -- and immediately after -- Reconstruction and were elected partly because many Confederate veterans weren't allowed to vote.

It notes that black Texans of that era "proudly served" in a state police force, without pointing out that the police were widely hated, partly because many were black but also because they were often used for political purposes by Gov. Edmund Davis to harass Texas citizens and violate their rights.

Davis was a white Republican -- a Radical Republican -- and former Union Army officer who was voted out of office, after only one term, in 1873 but refused to step down until an armed militia threatened to march on the state Capitol.

He bore little resemblance to Republican leaders of today, but his administration and the oppressive Reconstruction policies were to put the GOP out of business in Texas for almost 100 years.

Many Democrats misbehaved as badly as Davis' Radical brand of Republicans did during that tumultuous time. There were incidents of voter fraud and violence on both sides in the Democrats' 1873 electoral victory.

Upon regaining power, conservative Democrats in Texas and throughout the South enacted Jim Crow segregation laws and other measures -- including a poll tax and a whites-only primary -- designed to keep blacks from voting, much less getting elected to office.

The Republican Party's new flier, of course, points out the Democrats' role in those discriminatory acts. But it fails to acknowledge that the Democratic leadership in Texas during those years was a different animal from today's Democrats.

The Republicans also fail to report that many conservative Democrats in Texas and other former Confederate states began switching to the Republican Party -- and helped rebuild the GOP in the South -- after national Democratic leaders in the mid-20th century started advocating civil rights and economic policies of particular importance to minorities.

The conservatives' departure made room for a more prominent role in the Democratic Party for blacks and Texas' growing Hispanic population, which also benefited from the party's new initiatives and court decisions striking down the discriminatory voting laws.

Instead of presenting an edited version of history, Republicans need to look more to the future, when minorities will make up a majority of Texans. Some Republicans are looking ahead, but the party's dominant anti-tax, pro-business, social conservative agenda hasn't caught on with most minority voters, who have historically been boosted by expanded educational opportunities, improved health care and affirmative action opportunities.

Blacks and other Americans are grateful to the Republican Party for its years-ago role in ending slavery. But the relevant question for most black voters now is what have Republicans done for them lately.

And based on their strong Democratic voting record, their obvious answer is, "Not nearly enough."